Several Unified Communications (UC) software applications have proliferated into the enterprise communications market. These applications allow end-users to communicate using voice, video, application and data sharing, instant messaging, etc. A few examples of these applications include Microsoft Lync, Skype, IBM Sametime, Cisco IP Communicator, etc.
Most of these applications use different call control protocols and media formats (i.e. video/audio encoding and decoding formats), making them incompatible with each other. For example, Microsoft Lync uses a proprietary implementation of the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) that is different from that being implemented by Skype for call negotiation. In addition, various UC applications typically operate with different media formats, thereby causing these applications to become incompatible with each other for communicating audio, video, or data streams. As a result, the communication among these applications is facilitated by a multipoint control unit, which may be implemented as standalone hardware or a web-based service via a central host performing call signaling and media transcoding. The standalone hardware is extremely costly whereas the web-based central host does not support ad-hoc communication among the UC applications running on terminals that are not connected to the same central host.
Further, the multipoint control unit typically allows multiple UC applications to access local hardware devices in a mutually exclusive manner. For example, video data streams from one UC application are temporarily restricted from being played on a local hardware device such as a display device while the device is in use by another UC application. As a result, the multipoint control unit induces an unwanted delay during execution of simultaneously received data streams from different UC applications
Therefore, there exists a need for a system that allows multiple UC applications to access the local hardware devices simultaneously for ad-hoc unified communications.